In a message dated 5/5/2010 9:11:00 PM Central Daylight Time, jansy@AETERN.US writes:
Matt[ to Gary] "I think you may be overselling the degree to which the lack of art reveals madness... Shade needs to get us to line 1000, so we need another 15 lines. In these we find...details...trivial in the poem itself... we get the final interruption--a man with a wheelbarrow. Who is he? What is he doing in the penultimate line of the poem? And how does that wheelbarrow lead us back to line 1? I know the relationship to the clockwork toy, but I don't think Shade himself is making that connection here."
JM: In a long past posting ( January 2007, # 197 amd Jan 22 listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0905...) Matt and I discussed gardener, wheelbarrow and butterfly similar to the ones I'd spotted in "King Queen Knave." * Da capo!!!! (as in line 1000?)
Checking the archives:Don B. Johnson..."suggested that echoes of Pale Fire 1962 entered the English 1968 version of Russian KQKn. I had thought the closeness of a Red Vanessa and death would confirm PF's lines - not the other way round.
Don's idea is factually more relevant. May I propose something new? That a Red Vanessa and doom, plus other repeated items, are a part of an even earlier experience which Nabokov inserted in various novels? There are various elements that are placed together with clock-work toy, doom-butterfly and gardener and wheel-barrow. For example: sounds (trundling and clink-tinkle and click clunk) and "heraldic design" ( the Red Vanessa is a "heraldic butterfly") Wheels and wheeling, too?
Oct. 2006,#415: "The neighbor's gardener might not have been "trundling a barrow" since he was holding a spade with which he hit Gradus"...a "real fictional" gardener and a "real fictional" black clockwork toy belonging to Shade into a "fictional fictional" black gardener trundling a barrow, who is also associated with Gradus as a "clockwork man".
The assumption here is that Shade (who apparently, in the way he seems to be described here, lacks any imagination whatsoever) has to "see" every detail that he records. He is a poet, not a journalist--he does not (I think) have a miniature ocean liner in his tub.
If he sees Kinbote's Negro gardener from his window, it may well be that he imagines the detail of the wheelbarrow, borrowing from memories of his childhood toy (which still exists, according to CK). This is not a great leap of association!
If Shade here wants to "loop" the poem back to his early childhood, what better than an image that summons up a childhood toy ("Rosebud") and the innocence that existed before his parents died? I don't see any problem at all with Shade's free (more or less) associations. He is a man (a poet) who has come through an immense personal unhappiness to see a transcendent joy in simply being alive (and having, dammit, to shave every day).
Oct. 2006,#415: "The neighbor's gardener might not have been "trundling a barrow" since he was holding a spade with which he hit Gradus"...a "real fictional" gardener and a "real fictional" black clockwork toy belonging to Shade into a "fictional fictional" black gardener trundling a barrow, who is also associated with Gradus as a "clockwork man".
Well, yes, but who says that the gardener could not have held a spade or a wheelbarrow or nothing at all at different times? Are you saying that Shade leapt from his bath to run outside and be shot just moments after he saw the gardener with his wheelbarrow (or whatever)? Why didn't, for the sake of consistency, the gardener run over Gradus instead of whacking him? Really now.
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